An excellent showcase of best practices in curating content in education while using different tools and services.

Sue Waters pulls together a great number of very good examples, of how curated content can be effectively used in education.

The analysis includes relevant statistical data on the use of content curation tools, and several chapters providing examples of how different types of content curation tools have been effectively utilized within an educational context.

My comment: Stunning. I don't know why it took me so long to discover it, but this is an amazing resource for book lovers of all kinds wanting to curate and share their own favorite books. While the interface shows quite a bit of age in many aspects, the array of functions and useful options available to the user is simply amazing.

If you are looking for your ideal content curation toolkit here is my new completely updated supermap, listing in over 30 categories all of the tools and services you may need to curate any content, from video to news.

This new supermap includes all of the tools and services that were already listed on NewsMaster Toolkit, with the addition of 25 new tools and with a much better organization of categories and labels.

My choice for organizing and recreating this supermap has now fallen on Pearltrees, the only content curation tool that can easily handle most of my key requirements for such a large collection of tools.

Nonetheless there are over 400 tools listed in this supermap, Pearltrees makes it a breeze to navigate through them, and to add new ones to the relevant branches.

The supermap is now being updated daily.

P.S.: I already feel the need for having a PRO account, which could allow me to further edit the pearls collected, to preserve original web pages saved, and to add images to pearls that weren't able to capture one from the web.

Robin Good: If you are a company looking for quality content from prestigious and reliable news sources, from which you can pick and choose which stories to publish on your web site, Hearsay may be the solution you are looking for.

This new content curation platform makes it quite easy for marketers and sales people to discover engaging third-party and custom content feeds.

In fact, in addition to premium third-party content, Hearsay Social customers can create and integrate custom news channels on the platform such as your company blog, a YouTube channel, or a custom RSS feed tailored to the interests of your organization.

From these they can pick and select their preferred content and share it directly to multiple social media networks such as LinkedIN, Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Robin Good: This is a one-hour recording of a webinar, where Jane Hart interviews David Kelly on curation.

I am reporting about it, because Jane's has lot of visibility and a good reputation, but while there is a lot of good, basic, introductory information about curation in this interview, some of the critical information contained in it, is at best incorrect if not altogether misleading to those seeking to understand the actual differences between the different curation tools presented.

While he does a good job of introducing what is curation (tapping fully into Rohit Barghava model but never acknowledging/ or referencing it), the different types of approaches that can be used, and dismantling the myth of "personal curation", he insists on a few of points that, in my humble view, are in need of review.

Specifically:

1) Know your data sources (not just one though).

Mr Kelly insists that one of the top skills a curator needs to have, is the ability to manage and skillfully use your key data source (in his case Twitter). True. But in reality, any good curator needs to be able to tap and be able to find and retrieve relevant information coming from anywhere. Limiting your source to Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook may actually be very limiting if your goal is to not to curate a "technology platform output", but what people are saying on a specific topic, no matter where they say it.

b) Everybody can be a curator. By clicking the "Share" button on Facebook makes anyone a curator as much as saving a file in Photoshop makes you a digital artist. No specific competence needed. As long as the stuff is cool and interesting.

c) Tools. Mr Kelly claims that while Storify, helps you to manually curate stories by picking and selecting individual pieces of information coming from different sources, tools such as Paper.li and Scoop.it do not provide such ability, as they automatically generate a news-magazine based on criteria you have provided.

While this is mostly true for Paper.li, it is definitely not true for Scoop.it, a tool that has no automatic publishing feature (like paper.li does) and which requires manual intervention from the user to select, edit and post whichever content items are most relevant to their audience needs.

Yes, I am an avid Scoop.it user, I am not posting this to defend this platform or to try to make it look better. Storify is a great curation tool indeed, but it has no better research, filtering or aggregation or content curation support than Scoop.it does. Scoop.it technology requires as much human intervention to curate content than Storify does.

May be more. Not less.

For one, and to meet Mr Kelly on his own grounds, Scoop.it provides a lot more opportunities to source and gather valuable content in its backend than Storify does, providing a richer set of filters and pre-set persistent search engines hooks than Storify does.

Therefore Mr Kelly recommendation of Storify, not only is founded on incorrect information, but it shows that Mr Kelly has clearly never used (beyond using it for news discovery) at least one of the tools he is using to make his evaluations, making his recommendations unreliable (this is how much he has used Scoop.it before evaluating it: http://i.imgur.com/AoaOU.jpg)

N.B.: I watched this whole video, from beginning to end, twice, to make sure I had not missed anything important.

For Jane: I would love you to exercise more pro-active curation of your interviewees, as asking questions to someone who may be passionate, but who has a limited experience in a specific area, can instantaneously dent into YOUR credibility and trust by those who know and appreciate you most, even when, most of the information being shared is of value.

I would question how someone who transparently admits not to include any opinion in his curation work can be considered a curator to whom to go and ask for advice.

What selection criteria are you using to elect someone as your guide in a field you do not know well? Which way would it be best to frame an interview like this one without running into the risk of becoming a promoter / supporter for the things being said? (You keep complimenting him, but wouldn't it be better if you acted more like a skeptical investigator rather than as a very accomodating and complacent host?)

Maybe I would frame this differently, as for example having an open conversation with someone starting to explore this field (given the amount of time he has spent and researched this area by his own admission), and everything said in here could become suddenly fully acceptable. But if you serve this as an "expert" voice to listen to, I have all the right to ask proof for this "experience".

Complacency is not for the curator-publisher of tomorrow. Explorers, questioners, guides, critical commenters are what I need.

I may be a demanding perfections but I think that interviews must maintain a level of critical judgement whereby the answer you receive are not just opportunities to compliment your guests, but also vital spots to ask difficult questions, demand examples and some kind of proof of what is being claimed.

For David: I actually think you did a great job, as you introduced and well explained some of the basic concepts of curation clearly.

Tools and their use is an area where there is a lot more to explore and I look forward to a more precise re-evaluation of the tools you have selected.

I really have nothing against you, but I feel it is my role to use this space also to be constructively critical of anything that I see could be improved. I probably make more mistakes than you do, and you are welcome anytime to highlight them.

P.S.: For readers: The overall length of the webinar is one-hour but there are only a few slides to see. You are not going to miss much if you just listen to it.

Some good things tainted by some incorrect information. Opportunity to reflect on those curating curators. (A little bug can rot a great apple.)

Do you think it would have been better for the authors to provide a feedback or a comment to these issues rather than closing down the video for everyone?

In a situation like this, what is more appropriate to do, in your view?
Take down the material that may have some disputable parts, or discuss openly the issues with everyone while fully acknowledging possible overlooks and mistakes?

I suppose what anyone makes of it depends upon how much slack is deserved. Jane Hart has been a serious asset in my search for answers to social media questions especially lately with her work at Internet Time Alliance, but...

1. Perhaps they realized that the webinar was a bit off the cuff. Half-baked might be less charitable, but I don't know because it's PRIVATE. I cannot make my own judgment and that is not good.

2. It might be painful, but sunlight is always best in public conversation. I would not take down the disputed parts but rather view them as starting points for another webinar

3. Don't you think they are missing a wonderful opportunity to drive traffic to their site? I do. It isn't too late. I would love to follow that, perhaps a Hangout on Air? I am working with a study group on P2PU that will open a discussion of curation for the National Writing Project's Digital Is network that is considering some of what you have already spoken to (https://p2pu.org/en/groups/curating-our-digital-lives/). Our goal is teacher-centered curation and I know my teaching fellows would value this conversation. Hell, we might just have it ourselves.

I don't think you are wrong in your critique but without a public conversation we will never really know for certain, will we. Perhaps it would be a dialectic and a grander truth than yours or Kelly's would evolve from it.

Long ago, in a former life, I used to get newspaper articles passed to me each day that were relevant to my job and/or my aspirations. I would take the necessary hour or so each day to remain current with world affairs related to what I did or where I wanted to go.

Collectably is a content curation web app which allows you to bookmark any web site and to organize it into visual collections. A unique Chrome extension makes Collectably particularly useful as it pioneers the ability to save all of your open tabs into a visual collection that you can immediately prune, organize visually and sub-divide into specific groups.

This feature by itself is worth gold for any serious researcher or content curator as it allows to easily move from seeing just trees into seeing the whole forest and into organizing into logical groups for further work. Priceless.

If you frequently search and explore new information and tools online, I highly recommend it. It's that good.

N.B.: You have by default a similar functionality available inside Firefox. It is called Group Tabs and you can activate it by goign to the View menu -> Toolbars -> Customize and by dragging the mosaic looking Tab Group icon into your browser top bar.

Try it. It's excellent. The only difference with Collectably is that Group Tabs are private to you and not shareable on the web.

If you use Chrome, you can collect several open tabs at once with this extension -- great way to save your place if you have to quite while in the middle of researching something, but also a good way to package disparate sources of information together.

Now you can enjoy Flipboard magazines on the Web. Here's a quick tutorial about their basic features. To start browsing Web magazines, go to: https://flipboa...

Robin Good's insight:

If you want to curate a cool-looking visual magazine on a specific topic, Flipboard offers a free, and very easy-to-use solution, potentially reaching a very large audience.

The real news is that the mobile-born app, is now available also on the Web, both for creating and editing new magazines as well as for reading them on any standard browser.

Use is extremely simple and straightforward. After you have created a new magazine on the topic of your choice, you can easily a) search through Flipboard curated content and "reflip" relevant items to your magazine, or b) use a dedicated button / bookmarklet to add "on-the-fly" web articles or videos to one or more of your mags.

The trade-in for all of this simplicity is very little opportunity for editing and personalization. You can't edit the title, add your image, or format your introductory comments, nor you can decide anything about how your curated content will be laid out and presented.

It is possible to invite other users to collaborate and contribute to your own magazines and it's easy to share what you post in Flipboard also on your preferred social media (Facebook, Twitter).

Flipboard does an excellent job of curating the hundreds of thousands of visual magazines being created by picking, organizing and surfacing the best and most interesting ones. This approach provides a very effective solution to filtering out shallow, superficial and spammy content, in favor of truly memorable visual collections of pointers to great content.

My comment: Content curation on Flipboard is a 4-step process that even non-technical people can understand quite easily.

Flipboard it's as easy and simple to use as Pinterest. You find an interesting an article on a topic you cover? You tap the "+" button (on your smartphone) or click the "Flip it" button (desktop), you select an image, add a comment, pick in which magazine of yours to place it and you're done.

Flipboard is a powerful tool because it makes it extremely easy to pick content and repackage it into a stunningly beautiful visual magazine that can be read and edited across any type of device.

The skills and ability of the Flipboard internal curation team makes all of the difference in making Flipboard a unique "open" source of high-quality curated content, organized by topics, presented in a stunning visual format. In this respect Flipboard is a significant step ahead of its direct competitors. That is, if you are looking for a quality source of content curated by users, Flipboard has something of value to provide.

Excellent solution for anyone who has an interest in curating a very elegant looking web visual magazine without having to learn anything new.

Limiting for anyone in need to have more control over sources management, content editing and personalization, distribution and white labelling options.

To be fair. First the CEO of Flipboard had added my Future magazine to his personal list of his favorite magazines. Then some weeks later the team at Flipboard added my magazine in their new overview of officially recommended Flipboard user magazines, where I'm still listed here (https://flipboard.com/magazines/#tech-science) that is when my readership grew to 8000 people. Now I've noticed that my magazine is also showing up in the recommended list of tech magazines in the Flipboard app, next to large media sites like Ars Technica or Giga OM or TNW. That is when I grew to 10.000 readers.

So my point is: Flipboard starting the web version was not the only effect why I got so many new readers there. Basically the reason was their promotion of my magazine, which started when they started their web version.

A selection of fashion sites and tools that allow you to collect your favorite products and brands

Robin Good's insight:

If you look at the industry in which content curation tools and services have had the most leeway so far, that would be positively fashion, and, in my impression, by a good margin over the rapidly growing education/learning sector.

The fashion industry has embraced digital curation wholeheartedly more than any other sector so far, because of its strong visual element (the same one that has popularized the curation concept thanks to tools like Pinterest), and thanks to the natural inclination that fashion customers have for picking, collecting and sharing their unique preferences and combinations.

In this visual collection I have brought together the most interesting examples of curation at work in the world of fashion. Tools, services, communities, brands and products, all working together to filter, aggregate, pick and create relevant "selections" for the infinite number of tribes out there.

Robin Good: Everytime I see a new post or article claiming to list the best content curation tools I know I am in for some disappointment.

Most of these lists just pick up names from other lists without even bothering to check, test or verify what these tools actually do, whether they are still available. Unfortunately the rush to put out "curated" list of tools and services has created more misinformation than useful lists.

But if you, like me, are on the lookout for new and effective tools to curate your own content or the one of your customers, I have created a comprehensive map of all the curation tools available online and I keep it fresh and updated almost on a daily basis.

The map presently lists over 250 content curation tools which you can navigate much more easily than it was possible on my earlier versions of this map.

On the right side of the map you will find all of the news and content curation tools available online today. On the left side, you can find bookmarking, link lists builders, clippers and lots of tools to operate with RSS feeds (which are still at the heart of a curator's job).

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Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.